=Paper=
{{Paper
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|storemode=property
|title=Apps for Synchronized Photo-Audio Recordings to Support Students
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-983/paper7.pdf
|volume=Vol-983
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==Apps for Synchronized Photo-Audio Recordings to Support Students==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-983/paper7.pdf
Apps for Synchronized Photo-Audio
Recordings to Support Students
Enrique Canessa Livio Tenze
International Centre for International Centre for
Theoretical Physics -ICTP Theoretical Physics -ICTP
Abstract
Trieste, Italy Trieste, Italy
We introduce new prototype Apps for the automated
canessae@ictp.it ltenze@ictp.it
recording of complete lessons, seminars, talks, etc
using mobile devices running Android OS and iOS,
Carlo Fonda Marco Zennaro
which aim at supporting the recoding of academic
International Centre for International Centre for
lectures by students themselves. These Apps are free
Theoretical Physics -ICTP Theoretical Physics -ICTP
for use and are based on the experiences gained by the
Trieste, Italy Trieste, Italy
ICTP Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) in Trieste, Italy
cfonda@ictp.it mzennaro@ictp.it
with its open source “Enhance your Audience” (EyA)
recording system: wwww.openeya.org --with more
than 10 thousands hours of automated educational
recordings in the fields of physics and mathematics.
Author Keywords
Automated recording, Photo-Audio Recordings, physics
Copyright © 2013 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. and mathematics
Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. ACM Classification Keywords
WAVe 2013 workshop at LAK’13, April 8, 2013, Leuven, Belgium. H.4.3 Communications Applications, H.5.1 Multimedia
Information Systems, H.5.2 User Interfaces, K.6
Management of Computing and Information Systems
29
Motivation large variety of mobile devices to communicate with
Rich-media video recordings of lectures, seminars, their peers and to participate in social networks
conferences, etc are now being produced world-wide by activities or to use them during their academic
prestigious institutions, research centers, schools and activities. From the technological point of view, many
others since the technology to implement video efforts have been principally devoted to support the
streaming and recordings is getting robust and cost recordings by Institutions, and little support has been
effective. Another reason for this growth lies in the fact given to the possibly of developing tools for allowing
that access to the Internet is now available to all at students to carry out their own recordings, which
affordable costs and at faster speeds throughout should be optimized for long traditional classroom
different means, including the new mobile devices. It is lectures of 45min or so.
forecasted that in only few years ahead, on-line videos
traffic will consume most of the bandwidth available for In this work we introduce our new prototype Apps for
academia and entertainment [1]. the automated recording of complete lessons,
seminars, talks, etc using mobile devices running
Pioneering educational video archives such as the MIT Android OS, and iOS (displayed in Fig.1). Our aim is to
OpenCourseWare [2], and the ICTP pre-PhD Diploma support the recoding of academic lectures by the
Courses On-line for Physics and Mathematics [3] are students themselves.
increasing their popularity with scholars around
continents. New open educational programs for blended
learning, mobile learning and others in different fields
are being developed and made available at reasonable
prices, giving the opportunity scholars to advance in
their careers. Most recently, the implementation of
Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOC) [4, 5] by
EdX.org of MIT and Harvard are opening also new ways
to offer excellence and free education for all. The
technology needed to optimize these educational
programs such as Coursera and Audacity are still under
developments [6]. In this regard, the recent Pinvox
algorithm [7] can be used to certificate self-study by
the attentive vision by students of their assigned
educational on-line videos by their Tutors. Figure 1. EyApp icon on a iPhone.
There is little work for supporting and facilitating the EyApp & AndrEyA Apps
easy recordings by the students themselves, specially The releases of the applications for AndrEyA on Android
now that they have easier access to computers, and a OS and EyApp that can be used also on iPads and iPod
30
touch, have been deployed to allows scholars to make EyApp is available on the iPhone App Store:
their own recordings or Postcasts with just the press of https://itunes.apple.com/, and the AndrEyA App
a button, and to allow them to share their recorded through the website http://www.andreya.org.
courses immediately on the Internet soon after the
lectures ends or save it for future reference and study. Like a small video camera, EyApp (shown in Fig. 2) and
AndrEyA can simultaneously record the voice of the
These Apps are free for download and use, and are speaker and take pictures of the screen, which projects
based on the experiences gained by the ICTP Science digital presentations, or from a podium holding a
Dissemination Unit (SDU) in Trieste, Italy with its open traditional blackboard. As a main difference though,
source “Enhance your Audience” (EyA) recording these Apps on an iDevice (iPhone, iPad or even an iPod
system: www.openeya.org --with more than ten touch) save students from the frustration of learning
thousands hours of automated educational recordings the art and science of video recording and the many
in the fields of physics and mathematics (see: ICTP.tv). options of conversion to multiple video formats.
Figure 2. EyApp Control Panel with buttons for Manual Photo
Figure 3. EyApp Frame Control from 5 to 20 seconds.
Shooting, Recording/Stop, Pause, Preferences and View.
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With EyApp and AndrEyA Apps it is possible to create recording archives as well as to share them via popular
one’s own photo-audio movies that are composed by self-video archives such as YouTube.
still frames (i.e., screenshots of what is projected or
written by the speaker or lecturer) synchronized with a
continuous audio signal. The result is a file of smaller
size compared with a traditional video (HD or standard
resolution) because the still frames can greatly benefit
of the highly-efficient compression algorithms used by
the H264 video format used by modern mobile
iDevices.
Figure 5. EyApp Output files containing synchronized audio-
photo recordings. These can be easily erased or transferred.
Our final goal is to facilitate the recording of seminars
with Apps like EyApp and AndrEyA, either at an School,
University, Conference or anywhere a student could be
Figure 4. AndrEyA App icon for Android: www.andreya.org
present. Most importantly for the project ay hand is to
allow students to record an event of their interest at
Within EyApp and AndrEyA one can shot automatically,
any time and for their own purposes, and/or for sharing
every 5, 10, 15 or 20 seconds, or the shootings can be
their recordings with colleagues and friends.
controlled manually by the user as shown in Fig. 3,
allowing for many different situations of usage. There is
Mobile Internet in Developing Countries
also the possibility to pause the recording by pressing a
For developing countries experiencing the so-called
button and to re-start the recording again from the
Digital Divide, there are now new opportunities to
point at which was paused, saving in this way periods
leapfrog “old” technologies such as wired phones and
of silence or any breaks done throughout during the
desktop computers. This is increasingly the case in
lectures.
Africa, as the costs of intelligent mobile devices
continue to fall and the prices and availability for WiFi
To make the application even more engaging, EyApp
and cell phone coverage improve [8].
outputs (and also next versions of AndrEyA --whose
icon is shown in Fig. 4) can be saved on the device's
According to a recent report [9], Africa is the most
photo/movie gallery, and from there it can be further
dynamic e/m-Learning market on the planet. In the last
edited with other Apps, shared by e-mail and rich-
two years, many African countries have embarked on
media messaging systems, or via social networking
new government backed initiatives to integrate learning
Apps, or transferred to a computer (c.f., Fig. 5). In
technologies into education and training. The growth
particular, our EyApp allows to create personal
rate for self-paced e-Learning is above 15%. Senegal
32
has the highest growth rate in Africa at 30.4%, also tremendous. With 5.9 billion mobile-cellular
followed by Zambia (27.9%), Zimbabwe (25.1%) and subscriptions, today’s global penetration reaches 87%
Kenya at 24.9%. and 79% in the developing world. Mobile phones have
changed the way people access the Internet to study,
Many countries are adopting e/m-Learning programs as work and search for information and knowledge.
a way to meet the strong demand for higher education.
For example, the pan-regional virtual University of Mobile-broadband subscriptions have grown 45%
South Africa (UNISA) has over 310,000 students (of annually over the last four years, and today there are
which 3,500 come from outside Africa). A year ago, the twice as many mobile-broadband as fixed subscriptions.
African Development Bank Group (AfDB) approved a This means that people, especially scholars at a young
$15.6 million grant, "to help strengthen the capacity of age, use the Internet via mobiles devices more than
the African Virtual University (AVU)", with the goal to they do at home. Hence, it is foreseen that educational
use these funds to build out 12 e-Learning Centers. Apps, like EyApp and AndrEyA --that aim to support
students’ work, will became more and more useful and
On the other hand, the growth of mobile phone popular.
subscriptions world-wide in the last few years has been
Acknowledgements [5] Cooper, S., “Reflections on Stanford’s MOOCs”,
We would like to thank Prof. Fernando Quevedo, ICTP Communications of the ACM 56 (2013) 28-30.
Director, for supporting our SDU projects, and Pankaj [6] ACM’s White Paper on On-Line Education 2013:
Nathani for help with the technicalities. http://www.acm.org/education/online_learning_white_
paper.
References [7] Canessa, E., Fonda, C., and Zennaro, M., “On-line
[1] Bandwidth consumption statistics from the Internet certification for all: the Pinvox algorithm”, Inter. J.
Society: http://www. oc.org/. Emerging Tech. in Learning (iJET) 7 (2012) pp. 43-45.
[2] MIT OpenCourseWare – Free On-line Course [8] Cottrrel., R.L., “m-Learning in Classrooms and
Materials: http://ocw.mit.edu/. Research” in “Mobile Science & Learning”, Eds. Canessa
E. and Zennaro, M., ICTP Publishing ISBN 92-95003-
[3] Canessa, E., Fonda, C., and Zennaro, M., “One year
47-0.
of ICTP diploma courses on-line using is the automated
EyA recording system“, Computers & Education 53 [9] The Africa Market for Self-paced eLearning
(2009) 183-188. Products and Services: 2011-2016 Forecast and
Analysis: http://www.tonybates.ca/2013/01/29/africa-
[4] Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) Trends: is-the-worlds-fastest-developing-e-learning-market/
http://hackeducation.com/2012/12/03/top-ed-tech-
trends-of-2012-moocs/
33